A website that lists the victims of Righthaven LLC 'shakedown' lawsuits that are causing irreparable harm to bloggers and advocacy websites.

Righthaven LLC -- a bottom feeding legal outfit -- has teamed up with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Denver Post to sue mom and pop websites, advocacy and public interest groups and forum board operators for copyright infringement. The strategy of Righthaven is to sue thousands of these website owners, who are primarily unfunded and will be forced to settle out of court.

To date Righthaven has been ordered to pay $323,138 in legal fees and sanctions.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

If you have a photo or a fully-reproduced article from the Salt Lake Tribune on your website or your blog, you may soon be sued for copyright violations.
This has become an imminent issue, perhaps, now that the Tribune--like sister paper the Denver Post, also owned by MediaNews Group--has made an explicit warning to readers about its copyrights. Less than a month after a similar warning was issued by the Post, a blogger was sued for violating the Post's copyright.

3 comments:

We as Utah bloggers and website operators are not going to sit still for this. If the Salt Lake Tribune sues even one person we will mobilize the entire Utah blogging community to delink and shun the Salt Lake Tribune. We will not send them or their advertisers any traffic.

I am not disputing Righthaven's or the Salt Lake Trib or anyones right to seek justice but the way Righthaven is going about it is causing a lot of injustice and in the name of being robbed they themselves have become the robbers.

Many people Righthaven have sued were well within any reasonable definition of fair use but Righthaven takes advantage of the fact it costs more to defend yourself than to settle. The evidence is the fact that Righthaven has yet to win a single case that has actually gone to court. At least one has been dismissed on fair use grounds and in one case the judge ordered Righthaven to explicitly prove that the defendant was not exercising fair use. Their are also counter-claims against Righthaven for litigating in bad faith as well as several complaints against them with the Las Vegas Bar.

I believe that Righthaven will eventually be taken down by court rulings because their business model is fundamentally dishonest but in the mean time they are trampling on the rights of others in the name of protecting their own rights. For the Trib to align themselves with such an organization is putting themselves in the den of vipers and thieves.